War on cancer has been...not completely a fail? Certainly made harder by profiteering, but, y'know.
Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".
Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".
But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.
https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-s...
Every disease can be arbitrarily split or combined into multiple categories. It doesnt mean anything. Here is a cure for cancer:
1) Detect aneuploid cells that fail to show the initial steps of the response to extracellular apoptosis signals, and have been dividing more often than usual for that tissue/environment (eg you have to take into account wound healing, etc).
2) Kill those cells.
This is technological problem, not a "cancer is many diseases" problem. Every problem can manifest in many ways and have multiple solutions.
EDIT:
Ref for "10% replication rate":
>"scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases." https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
More info in this (short) thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687879
The next two were spent attempting to save the project by working 18 hour days almost constantly. In the end, despite what they claimed about doing it the usual way because "its so complicated, no one can come up with mathematical/computational models or actual predictions to test, no one can describe this or that in so much detail, etc", the actual truth was that it wasnt "too hard". It was that no one really cared about that. Instead they just wanted to know whether there were statistically significant differences anyway...
From what I've read of the cancer literature it looks exactly the same, probably worse. And guess what, there's been no real progress made for decades on the topic I was studying either.
>"A large effort to reproduce high-impact cancer research has scaled down the number of studies it plans to replicate from 50 to 18, Science reported yesterday (July 31).
[...]
Hurdles to replicating experiments included a lack of detailed protocols and easily obtainable reagents. “Communication and sharing are low-hanging fruit that we can work on to improve,” Elizabeth Iorns, the president of Science Exchange, tells Science." https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/effort-to-reprodu...
Yup, the entire system is set up for an environment of no replication. How do you expect to cure cancer without making reproducibility a priority? I'd expect people who don't do that will end up thinking everything is "so complicated" due to all the conflicting results they generate, eg "one disease" becomes "many diseases".
The way I read it is that they were so far from a cure that they didn't even know what they were trying to achieve.